Monthly Archives: November 2015

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My university’s decision to sell its public radio station (KPLU) to Seattle’s (KUOW), has upset lots of KPLU listeners both on and off campus. You can read the PLU president’s rationale here and decide for yourself how persuasive it is.

The sale is being reported as $8m, but it’s really $7m since $1m is $100k worth of radio advertising for ten consecutive years. At a recent faculty meeting the president said young adult radio listening is down 41% which prompted me to ask him why then the $1m in advertising.

What’s happening to KPLU’s news team has been happening across the United States for the last decade. Battered by the Great Recession and the migration of audiences to the Internet, America’s traditional news operations . . . have collectively been forced to shed many thousands of professional journalism jobs.

That would merely be tough luck for those companies if new digital media were picking up the slack. Many traditional media companies . . . have successfully migrated to the Internet themselves. But online news rarely attracts the kind of advertising revenue that the old media once enjoyed.

It’s not just lost advertising revenue, it’s Craigslist and other on-line publications which have siphoned off classified revenue, another critical stream.

The Tacoma paper predicts what will happen next:

Shrunken newsrooms and fewer reporters and news editors. With fewer reporters, there’s less news. Pardon the sarcasm, but it’s remarkable how much less scandal there is in government and the corporate world now that fewer journalists are on the lookout for it.

The Web creates an illusion of abundant news. There is in fact an abundance of commentary about the news; political websites and blogs are saturated with punditry and ideological spin. There’s also a lot of news that’s been recycled, aggregated, tweeted, repurposed and attached to ads on the Web. But there’s less real bedrock information out there than it appears.

The Good Wife and I went a little cray cray last weekend and went to two movies. One of those, Spotlight, is the story of the Boston Globe’s 2000-2002 reporting on the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal.

Even though the story happened only 14-15 years ago, it felt like much longer. Almost like entering a time capsule. It’s a last gasp salvo against the march of the internet, an engaging case study of important investigative reporting. Unbelievably, the editors kept slowing down the journalists, telling them to take more time, meaning using more resources.

Since power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, a vibrant democracy depends in large part on a free and tenacious press that repeatedly asks challenging questions of people in power. Legions of journalists are sounding a warning, saying few media entities have the financial wherewithal to do original, excellent investigative reporting.

But I’m unaware of journalists thinking creatively about alternative revenue streams. So I will offer an idea. What if super wealthy philanthropists gave less to the (normally) already super wealthy universities they attended, and instead, made seven and eight figure gifts to our once great newspapers, or their newer online competitors, to create endowments for them, just like colleges and universities have, so that they can count on the revenue those endowments would generate.

And what about endowing journalists more specifically, like an endowed chair at a college or university? The Daniel Pearl Chair of Southeast Asian Reporting. The David Carr Chair of Media Studies. Seems to me this idea might appeal to super wealthy lefties and right wing nutters since the resulting investigative light would shine on scoundrels of every conceivable ideological bent.

Postscript/Administrivia:

• Thanks to Adele for filling in for me last week.

• I just don’t get the Kobe worship (Rest in Peace moms). He’s shooting 31%! If he cared about the Laker’s future half as much as he does himself, he’d retire right now.

• Happy to report that I ran the Seattle Half Marathon Sunday without either calf rebelling. My time suggests what I’ve suspected, I’m getting older. My brother informs me my time was five minutes slower than his personal record. Forgets to mention Grease was the top grossing movie when he ran that race.

The oldest child in the family tends to be mature, confident and, more often than not, a perfectionist. As a result of the responsibilities and expectations placed on them by parents at an early age, older siblings are well organized and generally in control of their lives.

‘Firstborns handle money differently. I see a pattern in a lot of people that I know. They are viciously protective of making sure bills are paid on time and living within their means, which includes building savings and investments.’

“While the oldest child is often given the lion’s share of attention from parents, and the youngest can typically do no wrong, the middle child might feel lost in the shuffle.

Middle children are resigned to the fact that someone is always both ahead of and behind them in terms of familial structure. As a result, they are often found to be naturally gifted problem solvers with excellent negotiation skills. And when it comes to financial habits, the middle child is a born saver, with nearly 65 percent of the group contributing money to their savings accounts each month.'”

The youngest. Myself. Such a perfect, little, Idaho potato that my parents immediately decided to procreate no more:

“More often than not, this person is. . . the life of the party.

While the youngest children might seem charming and fun to be around, they also tend to demonstrate bad spending habits and are typically the least financially responsible of their siblings. It doesn’t help that parents have often become more lenient about discipline by the time the second or third child is born.

Parents have a habit of overindulging and spoiling the youngest children in families. Ultimately, this desire to protect the baby of the family can backfire, causing the individual to spend rather than save for a rainy day.”

Thanks to these poignant insights, I’m going to start trying to save more money. All while remaining true to my life of the party, charming, fun to be around self.

That’s how one pro football coach described the moment to his players right before game 9 of 16 this weekend. Hearing that, I thought it aptly described my present stage of life. Then again, life is fragile, so who knows, I could be a little or a lot closer to the End than I realize.

If it’s hard to figure out how to approach the End, it’s doubly hard when married because everyone thinks about the End a little, or a lot, differently. The Good Wife and I are thinking fairly differently about how to live at the beginning of the end. It would be a lot easier if she would start thinking more like me.